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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26921596">Pulse</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger'>Goldmonger</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Episode Tag, Episode: s15e14 Last Holiday, Gen, Hurt, Vampires, no comfort either</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 01:33:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,555</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26921596</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Monsters are bad, you see. Monsters need to die. </p><p>*</p><p>“No investigation, no dead ends, just – ding! Bloodsuckers!” – Dean, s15xe14 ‘Last Holiday’</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dean Winchester &amp; Sam Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Pulse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Me watching ‘Last Holiday’ having rewatched the season 2 episode ‘Bloodlust’ just last week 👁👄👁</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s a bright light that’s piercing his head like an ice pick. Sam closes his eyes, only for the pain of the light to transition to the sting of a foreign substance blending with his tears. It’s very warm.</p><p>“Anyone there?” he mumbles, still woozy from the crack to the back of his head. He’d woken up bound to a chair in an empty barn several minutes earlier, and the lack of company is starting to grate. Whoever has him went to the bother of plucking him from a grocery store parking lot, and they did it right in front of a cluster of CCTV cameras, too. Is he bait? Are demons getting bored, and looking to gain some reputation by kidnapping a Winchester? Why leave him alone afterwards?</p><p>He sighs. There must be something seriously wrong with him if he’s perturbed because he’s <em>not</em> being tortured.</p><p>He spends a while trying to access the blade sewn into his sleeve, but the combination of thick restraining rope and his throbbing injury makes it frustrating, clumsy work. Sam groans, and tries to focus on breathing at a regular pace without throwing up.</p><p>At some stage, sound swirls back to him in the vague timbre of voices. He tunes into the present with effort, the light making him squint; he can make out two figures by the doorway, small and slight and flitting like shadows. It’s pitch-black outside, moonlight glinting off the hood of a truck before the door is shut sharply. He wonders if he’s been gone from the bunker for a whole day or only a couple of hours. Keeping track of time has never been one of his strong suits.</p><p>“Hey,” he chances, swallowing his nerves. “If you want me conscious for this, you might want to turn off that spotlight. I can’t be scared if I can’t see your thumbscrews, right?”</p><p>He’s met with silence, which makes his heart sink. Normally demons love to banter, and if it were Chuck over there, he wouldn’t be capable of shutting himself up. The rest of his enemies are either dead or too frightened of him to pull off a mugging like this.</p><p>There’s a sudden gust of air by his ear, and then a whisper, deadly-soft: “Does it hurt the hunter?”</p><p>Yeah, he thinks, as Lucifer swims in his periphery. More than you know.  </p><p>“It’s uncomfortable,” he replies, cautious. He can still feel the concealed razor, but there’s no reaching it now.</p><p>There’s a gentle snort from his left, and he sees a girl drift out of the gloom. He feels exposed, his skin alabaster-white under the relentless glare.</p><p>“The hunter doesn’t like the light, Viola,” says the girl, stopping just short of his knees. She can’t be much more than twenty, though she’s gaunt enough to pass for far older than that. She chews her lip as she watches Sam, her teeth gnawing on a callous that proves it to be a habit.</p><p>“Precious,” murmurs the girl by his ear, who glides out to stand beside her companion. “And they say they are so different from us.”</p><p>“If you tell me what you want,” Sam says slowly, gauging their odd demeanour through his headache, “I might be able to help you.”</p><p>Viola cackles, a short, nasty burst of noise that is abruptly cut off. She looks to the other girl with open, vicious longing.</p><p>“Let me do it, Mia. The other one will come anyway.”</p><p>“Not yet,” says Mia. She crouches, inches from him, and gazes up into his face like she’s searching for something lost. “I’ve told you already. I brought him here to answer to us.”</p><p>Viola snarls, and darts back behind him. He curses when her thin fingers swipe at the pate of his skull, right on top of his wound. There’s a pause, and then she reappears, her mouth smeared red.</p><p>“You taste like shit,” she tells him flatly, then stalks into the corner of the barn, where Sam can’t see her. He turns back to Mia, who is tracing her jaw thoughtfully, her hair stuck to her temples in greasy spirals. She’s skinny, and pale-skinned to the point of appearing ill.</p><p>“We’ve been waiting for you to show yourselves for weeks,” she says calmly. Her eyes rove over him: face, torso, limbs, lingering on the blood dripping into his eyes and the bandaged knuckle that he split while sparring the day before. “You’re hard men to find.”</p><p>“That’s by design,” he says warily. “Why am I here?”</p><p>Mia stands, blurring as he tries to keep up with her speed.</p><p>“You’re a hunter,” she says coldly. “Your kind has been chasing my family for a generation, and you finally caught us.”</p><p>Sam looks at her then, properly. The pieces don’t click as quickly as they should, but sue him, he’s trussed and bleeding. “You’re vampires?”</p><p>She grins, a humourless twitch. “What, you didn’t think there would be more of us?”</p><p>Sam shifts, dread building in his chest. Mia follows his motion like a hungry snake.</p><p>“Our oldest brother was paranoid about hunters, you know,” she says. “Kept us moving, a new state every few months, like we were being tracked all the time. I spent so long thinking he was crazy. We weren’t even doing anything wrong. Why would they come for us?”</p><p>Viola hisses, still out of his range of sight.</p><p>“He said it didn’t matter,” Mia continues. “He said all they cared about was the blood.”</p><p>Sam’s brain practically whirs as he attempts to connect disparate dots, all dancing in a kaleidoscope of pain. He’s not foolish enough to suggest their anger is misdirected, but he also knows there’s no list long enough to contain all the names of the people who would want him dead, let alone the monsters. He’s wronged them. That’s all that counts right now.</p><p>“Listen,” he says levelly, “whatever the problem is –,”</p><p>“Problem!” shrieks Viola, until Mia quells her with an upraised hand.</p><p>“You murdered Alonso and David,” she says curtly. The sentence falls like a guillotine.</p><p>Sam waits for further accusations, then shakes his head, before he thinks better of it. “I don’t know –,”</p><p>“Don’t you?” Mia gestures to the dingy barn around them. “You killed them right here. You took off their <em>fucking</em> heads –,”</p><p>She slaps him across the face as she spits, and a new spike of agony shoots through him.</p><p>“– right here,” she finishes, panting. “They were watching TV while they waited for us to come back. We were about to move to yet another shithole, because we’d just hit a blood bank, and we didn’t want to draw attention.”</p><p>She grabs his hair, forces his head back. “Do you hear me, you ape? We’ve sucked down cow blood and rat blood and whatever we can steal from hospitals for <em>one hundred and eight years</em>, and you come along and you kill us in half a second, and you did it for nothing. Nothing.”</p><p>She releases him, slinks back. “I’ve never killed a human. Not until tonight.” She points at him. “You did this. You created a killer, two killers, when you took my brothers. I want you to know that. I want –,”</p><p>There’s a gentle squelching sound, and Sam looks past Mia to where Viola is sitting – then slumping, a formless heap on the straw-laden ground.</p><p>“No,” Mia gasps. “No –,”</p><p>She’s interrupted by a dart that is suddenly protruding from her throat, sending her staggering. The ampoule is colour-coded dark red. Dead-man’s blood, Sam recognises. He’d organised their weapons inventory just last year.</p><p>“Parasite bitches,” someone grunts, and then the spotlight is out of Sam’s eye-line, replaced by his scowling brother.</p><p>“Dean,” he says, because it’s his go-to when all other words fail him. His head is spinning, and not from his concussion.</p><p>“You all right? You’re lucky I came after you when you didn’t pick up the first time. Paranoia serves, huh?”</p><p>Sam can see Mia’s legs on the floor behind Dean, intermittently obscured as he starts untying Sam’s bindings. He only snaps back to reality when Dean cups the back of his head and mutters reprovingly about the state of it, as though Sam had willingly fallen backwards onto a baseball bat.</p><p>“I’m fine,” he says, but he accepts the bandana that Dean shoves into his hand. “Hey – Dean, you know they were –,”</p><p>“Fangbangers? Yeah, probably.” Dean kicks at Mia absently, and Sam flinches.</p><p>“No, I mean – they were vampires, they were a part of that nest we got a while back. One of Mrs. Butters’ hunts?”</p><p>Dean looks bewildered. “Doesn’t ring a bell. But hey – we finished the job now, right? Let that be a lesson to you, Sammy –,” and he bends over Mia, yanking a machete from his belt. “Make sure you stamp on every last roach in the sewer.”</p><p>The blade comes down cleanly, and Mia’s one hundred and eight year old head bounces off, then rolls several feet away.</p><p>“Fuckin’ monsters,” says Dean, wiping the machete on Mia’s yellowed dress. “Only good one’s a dead one, am I right?”</p><p>“Yeah,” says Sam. He feels small and stupid, like he’s twenty-five and in a motel room, his nose bleeding from a punch. “Yeah. Right.”</p><p>Good guys kill monsters; that’s been beaten into him a thousand times. He knows that, now. He knows that.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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